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The Internet of Things—sensors and actuators connected by networks to computing systems—has received enormous attention over the past five years. A new McKinsey Global Institute report, The Internet of Things: Mapping the value beyond the hype, attempts to determine exactly how IoT technology can create real economic value. Our central finding is that the hype may actually understate the full potential—but that capturing it will require an understanding of where real value can be created and a successful effort to address a set of systems issues, including interoperability.

To get a broader view of the IoT’s potential benefits and challenges across the global economy, we analyzed more than 150 use cases, ranging from people whose devices monitor health and wellness to manufacturers that utilize sensors to optimize the maintenance of equipment and protect the safety of workers. Our bottom-up analysis for the applications we size estimates that the IoT has a total potential economic impact of $3.9 trillion to $11.1 trillion a year by 2025. At the top end, that level of value—including the consumer surplus—would be equivalent to about 11 percent of the world economy (exhibit).

Labor markets around the world haven’t kept pace with rapid shifts in the global economy, and their inefficiencies have taken a heavy toll. Millions of people cannot find work, even as sectors from technology to healthcare struggle to fill open positions. Many who do work feel overqualified or underutilized. These issues translate into costly wasted potential for the global economy. More important, they represent hundreds of millions of people coping with unemployment, underemployment, stagnant wages, and discouragement.

Online talent platforms can ease a number of labor-market dysfunctions by more effectively connecting individuals with work opportunities. Such platforms include websites, like Monster.com and LinkedIn, that aggregate individual résumés with job postings from traditional employers, as well as the rapidly growing digital marketplaces of the new “gig economy,” such as Uber and Upwork. While hundreds of millions of people around the world already use these services, their capabilities and potential are still evolving. Yet even if they touch only a fraction of the global workforce, we believe they can generate significant benefits for economies and for individuals.

Two lost decades have taken a toll on Japan’s competitiveness, but the nation has a window of opportunity to shift its trajectory. A new McKinsey Global Institute report, The future of Japan: Reigniting productivity and growth, highlights potential avenues for growth and renewal, emphasizing areas where the private sector can take the lead. With its working-age population shrinking, Japan will have to rely on productivity as the main catalyst for economic momentum. While continued policy reform is necessary, the private sector is critical to capturing new growth opportunities. If individual companies take action to improve their performance, they could add trillions of dollars of value annually to the world’s third-largest economy.

Overall productivity growth in Japan has stalled below 2 percent for much of the past 20 years. Even Japan’s advanced manufacturing industries, which once introduced the world to the concept of “lean,” lag behind the comparable US and German sectors in labor productivity by almost one-third. A continuation of current trends would lead to annual GDP growth of only 1.3 percent through 2025. This sluggish pace will do little to boost household purchasing power and will only intensify the fiscal pressures of providing social-security and healthcare benefits to an aging population.

Yet if Japan can successfully double its rate of productivity increase by sharply focusing on raising value added and reducing costs, it could boost annual GDP growth to approximately 3 percent. By 2025, Japan’s GDP would increase by up to 30 percent over its current trajectory. The size of the prize would be growth of $1.4 trillion in that year alone (Exhibit 1).

Not surprising, we found that carbon-abatement efforts will put dramatically different levels of stress on the cash flows and valuations of different industries. The level of change for individual public companies within a given sector could of course substantially exceed the average, depending on their current position and their ability to respond to new technologies, changes in consumer behavior, and regulation.

Technological advances such as smartphones and apps have opened new frontiers of convenience, speed, and transparency for private-sector customers. At the same time, tightening government budgets are making it difficult for the public sector to deliver services of a similarly high quality. With consumer expectations only increasing, it’s perhaps no surprise that interactions with government agencies frustrate and disappoint many citizens. Yet when we sought to find out exactly why, we discovered cause for encouragement: issues that frustrate citizens are solvable, and the frustrations mostly revolve around the way services are provided rather than the services themselves. In fact, we believe governments can significantly improve the service experience while lowering costs and increasing employee engagement and satisfaction.

The open enrollment period (OEP) for year 2 of the individual e xchanges is officially under way, having begun on November 15 th. To understand how the products being offered this year differ from those offered during the 2014 OEP, the McKinsey Center for U.S. Health System Reform expanded its database to include all of the 335 carriers participating on the 2015 exchanges and all of the products they are offering there. This year, we were able to obtain data at a deeper level than we did last year (i.e., we were able to obtain 2014 and 2015 data for each county, not just each rating are a) . Thus , our database contains information on more than 223 ,000 ACA – compliant on – exchange products from both years, including premiums, benefit design, and network design . As a result, we were able to compare year – over – year carrier, product, and premium changes across the market as a whole. In ad dition , for each product offered in 2014 that was re – filed in 2015 , we linked the data from both years so that we could understand the specific changes that 2014 exchange enrollees are seeing during the 2015 OEP.

A new McKinsey Global Institute (MGI) discussion paper, Overcoming obesity: An initial economic analysis, seeks to overcome these hurdles by offering an independent view on the components of a potential strategy. MGI has studied 74 interventions (in 18 areas) that are being discussed or piloted somewhere around the world to address obesity, including subsidized school meals for all, calorie and nutrition labeling, restrictions on advertising high-calorie food and drinks, and public-health campaigns. We found sufficient data on 44 of these interventions, in 16 areas.

Although the research offers an initial economic analysis of obesity, our analysis is by no means complete. Rather, we see our work on a potential program to address obesity as the equivalent of the maps used by 16th-century navigators. Some islands were missing and some continents misshapen in these maps, but they were still helpful to the sailors of that era. We are sure that we have missed some interventions and over- or underestimated the impact of others. But we hope that our work will be a useful guide and a starting point for efforts in the years to come, as we and others develop this analysis and gradually compile a more comprehensive evidence base on this topic.